But, in 1830, Heine very soon found that the fire-engines of the German Governments were too much for his direct efforts at incendiarism. "What demon drove me," he cries, still make a fuss for what they themselves | have done so well without. But there has certainly followed from hence, in this country, somewhat of a general depression of pure intelligence Philistia has come to be thought" to write my Reisebilder, to edit a newspaper, by us the true Land of Promise, and it is any- to plague myself with our time and its interthing but that; the born lover of ideas, the ests, to try and shake the poor German Hodge born hater of commonplaces, must feel, in out of his thousand years' sleep in his hole? this country, that the sky over his head is of What good did I get by it? Hodge opened brass and iron. The enthusiast for the idea, his eyes, only to shut them again immedifor reason, values reason, the idea, in and for ately; he yawned, only to begin snoring themselves: he values them, irrespectively of again the next minute louder than ever; he the practical conveniences which their triumph stretched his stiff, ungainly limbs, only to may obtain for him; and the man who regards sink down again directly afterwards, and lie the possession of these practical conveniences like a dead man in the old bed of his accusas something sufficient in itself, something which compensates for the absence or surrender of the idea, of reason, is, in his eyes, a Philistine. This is why Heine so often and so mercilessly attacks the liberals; much as he hates conservatism he hates Philistinism even more, and whoever attacks conservatism itself ignobly, not as a child of light, not in the name of the idea, is a Philistine. Our Cobbett is thus for him, much as he disliked our clergy and aristocracy whom Cobbett attacked, a Philistine with six fingers on every hand, and on every foot six toes, four-andtwenty in number: a Philistine, the staff of whose spear is like a weaver's beam. Thus he speaks of him :— tomed habits. I must have rest; but where am I to find a resting-place! In Germany I can no longer stay." This is Heine's jesting account of his own efforts to rouse Germany: now for his pathetic account of them; it is because he unites so much wit with so much pathos that he is so effective a writer : "The Emperor Charles the Fifth sate in sore straits, in the Tyrol, encompassed by his enemies. All his knights and courtiers had forsaken him; not one came to his help. I know not if he had at that time the cheese face with which Holbein has painted him for us. But I am sure that under-lip of his, with its contempt for mankind, stuck out even more than it does in his portraits. How could he but contemn the tribe which in the sunshine of his prosperity had fawned on him so devotedly, and now, in his dark distress, left him all alone? Then suddenly his door opened, and there came in a man in disguise, and, as he threw back his cloak, the kaiser recognized in him his faithful Conrad von der Rosen, the court jester. This man brought him comfort and counsel, and he was the court jester! "While I translate Cobbett's words, the man himself comes bodily before my mind's eye, as I saw him at that uproarious dinner at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, with his scolding red face and his radical laugh, in which venomous hate mingles with a mocking exultation at his enemies' surely approaching downfall. He is a chained cur, who falls with equal fury on every one whom he does not know, often bites the best friend of the house in his calves, barks incessantly, and "O German fatherland! dear German peojust because of this incessantness of his bark- ple! I am thy Conrad von der Rosen. The ing cannot get listened to, even when he man whose proper business was to amuse barks at a real thief. Therefore, the distin- thee, and who in good times should have caguished thieves who plunder England do not tered only for thy mirth, makes his way into think it necessary to throw the growling Cob- thy prison in time of need; and here under bett a bone to stop his mouth. This makes my cloak, I bring thee thy sceptre and crown; the dog furiously savage, and he shows all dost thou not recognize me, my kaiser? If his hungry teeth. Poor old Cobbett! Eng- I cannot free thee, I will at least comfort land's dog! I have no love for thee: for every vulgar nature my soul abhors; but thou touchest me to the inmost soul with pity, as I see how thou strainest in vain to break loose and to get at those thieves, who make off with their booty before thy very eyes, and mock at thy fruitless springs and thine impote howling." thee, and thou shalt at least have one with thee who will prattle with thee about thy sorest affliction, and whisper courage to thee, and love thee, and whose best joke and best blood shall be at thy service. For thou, my people, art the true kaiser, the true lord of the land; thy will is sovereign, and more legitimate far than that purple Tel est notre plaisir, which invokes a divine right with no better warrant than the anointings of shaven and shorn jugglers; thy will, my people, is the sole rightful source of power. Though now thou liest down in thy bonds, yet in the end will thy rightful cause prevail; the day of deliverance is at hand, a new time is beginning. My kaiser, the night is over, and out there glows the ruddy dawn. "Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, thou art mistaken; perhaps thou takest a headsman's gleaming axe for the sun, and the red of dawn is only blood.' "No, my kaiser, it is the sun, though it is rising in the west; these six thousand years it has always risen in the east; it is high time there should come a change.' Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, thou has lost the bells out of thy red cap, and it has now such an odd look, that red cap of thine!' “Ah, my kaiser, thy distress has made me shake my head so hard and fierce, that the fool's bells have dropped off my cap; the cap is none the worse for that.' Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, what is that noise of breaking and cracking outside there?' Hush! that is the saw and the carpenter's axe, and soon the doors of thy prison will be burst open, and thou wilt be free, my kaiser!' "Am I then really kaiser? Ah, I forgot, it is the fool who tells me so!' Oh, sigh not, my dear master, the air of thy prison makes thee so desponding; when once thou has got thy rights again; thou wilt feel once more the bold, imperial blood in thy veins, and thou wilt be proud like a kaiser, and violent and gracious and unjust and smiling and ungrateful, as princes are.' Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, when I am free, what wilt thou do then?' "I will then sew new bells on my cap.' "And how shall I recompense thy fidelity,?' "Ah, dear master, by not leaving me to die in a ditch."" I wish to mark Heine's place in modern European literature, the scope of his activity, and his value. I cannot attempt to give here a detailed account of his life, or a description of his separate works. In May, 1831, he went over his Jordan, the Rhine, and fixed himself in his new Jerusalem, Paris. There, thenceforward, he lived, going in general to some French watering-place in the summer, but making only one or two short visits to Germany during the rest of his life. His works, in verse and prose, succeeded each other without stopping; a collected edition of them, filling seven closely-printed octavo volumes, has been published in America; in the collected editions of few people's works is there so little to skip. Those who wish for a single good specimen of him should read his first important work, the work which made his reputation, the Reisebilder, or “Travelling Sketches; prose and verse, wit and seriousness, are mingled in it, and the mingling of these is characteristic of Heine, and is nowhere to be seen practised more naturally and happily than in his Reisebilder. In 1847 his health, which till then had always been perfectly good, gave way. He had a kind of paralytic stroke. His malady proved to be a softening of the spinal marrow; it was incurable; it made rapid progress. In May, 1848, not a year after his first attack, he went out of doors for the last time; but his disease took more than eight years to kill him. For nearly eight years he lay helpless on a couch, with the use of his limbs gone, wasted almost to the proportions of a child, I wasted so that a woman could carry him about; the sight of one eye lost, and that of the other greatly dimmed, and requiring, that it might be exercised, to have the palsied eyelid lifted and held up by the finger; all this, and suffering, besides this, at short intervals, paroxysms of nervous agony. I have said he was not preeminently brave; but in the astonishing force of spirit with which he retained his activity of mind, even his gayety, amid all this suffering, and went on composing with undiminished fire to the last, he was truly brave. Nothing could clog that aërial lightness. "Pouvez-vous siffler ?" his doctor asked him one day, when he was almost at his last gasp;-" siffler," as every one knows, has the double meaning of to whistle and to hiss ;-" Hélas! non," was his whispered answer; pas même une comédie de M. Scribe!" M. Scribe is, or was, the favorite dramatist of the French Philistine. "My nerves," he said to some one who asked him about them in 1855, the year of the great Exhibition in Paris, "my nerves are of that quite singularly remarkable miserableness of nature, that I am convinced they would get at the Exhibition the grand medal for pain and misery." He read all the medical books which treated of his complaint. "But," said he to some one who found him thus engaged, "what good this reading is to do me I 66 don't know, except that it will qualify me to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth about diseases of the spinal marrow." What a matter of grim seriousness are our own ailments to most of us! yet with this gayety Heine treated his to the end. That end, so long in coming, came at last. Heine died on the 17th of February, 1856, at the age of fifty-eight. By his will he forbade that his remains should be transported to Germany. He lies buried in the cemetary of Montmartre, at Paris. which to group all its ideas. So the mystic and romantic school of Germany lost itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came to ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with a far profounder sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Ages than Görres or Brentano, or Arnim, Heine the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic poet; he is a great modern poet, he is not conquered by the Middle Ages, he has a talisman by which he can feel, along with, but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself the power of modern ideas. A French critic of Heine thinks he has said enough in saying that Heine proclaimed in German countries, with beat of drum, the ideas of 1789, and that at the cheerful noise of his drum the ghosts of the Middle Age took to flight. But this is rather too French an account of the matter. Germany, that vast mine of ideas, had no need to import ideas, as such, from any foreign country; and if Heine had carried ideas, as such, for France into Germany, he would but have been carrying coals to Newcastle. But that for which France, far less meditative than Germany is eminent, is the prompt, ardent, and practical application of an idea, when she seizes it, in all depart His direct political action was null, and this is neither to be wondered at nor regretted; direct political action is not the true function of literature, and Heine was a born man of letters. Even in his favorite France the turn taken by public affairs was not at all what he wished, though he read French politics by no means as we in England, most of us, read them. He thought things were tending there to the triumph of communism; and to a champion of the idea like Heine, what there is gross and narrow in communism was very repulsive. "It is all of no use," he cried on his death-bed," the future belongs to our enemies, the Communists, and Louis Napoleon is their John the Baptist." "And yet❞—he added with all his old love for that remarkable entity, so full of attrac-ments of human activity which admit it. tion for him, so profoundly unknown in England, the French people-" do not believe that God lets all this go forward merely as a grand comedy. Even though the Communists deny him to-day, he knows better than they do, that a time will come when they will learn to believe in him." After 1831 his hopes of soon upsetting the German governments had died away, and his propagandism took another, a more truly literary, character. It took the character of an intrepid application of the modern spirit to literature. To the ideas with which the burning questions of modern life filled him, he made all his subject-matter minister. He touched all the great points in the career of the human race, and here he but followed the tendency of the wide culture of Germany; but he touched them with a wand which brought them all under a light where the modern eye cares most to see them, and here he gave a lesson to the culture of Germany,-so wide, so impartial, that it is apt to become slack and powerless, and to lose itself in its materials for want of a strong central idea round And that in which Germany most fails, and by failing in which she appears so helpless and impotent, is just this practical application of her innumerable ideas. "When Candide," says Heine himself, "came to Eldorado, he saw in the streets a number of boys who were playing with gold-nuggets instead of marbles. This degree of luxury made him imagine that they must be the king's children, and he was not a little astonished when he found that in Eldorado gold-nuggets are of no more value than marbles are with us, and that the school-boys play with them. A similar thing happened to a friend of mine, a foreigner, when he came to Germany and first read German books. He was perfectly astounded at the wealth of ideas which he found in them; but he soon remarked that ideas in Germany are as plentiful as gold-nuggets in Eldorado, and that those writers whom he had taken for intellectual princes, were in reality only common school-boys." Heine was. as he calls himself, a " Child of the French Revolution," an " Initiator," because he vigorously assured the Germans that ideas were not counters or marbles, to be played with for ply freely the modern spirit was made in Engtheir own sake; because he exhibited in litera- land by two members of the aristocratic class, ture modern ideas applied with the utmost free- Byron and Shelley. Aristocracies are, as dom, clearness, and originality. And there- such, naturally impenetrable by ideas; but fore he declared that the great task of his their individual members have a high courage life had been the endeavor to establish a cor- and a turn for breaking bounds; and a man dial relation between France and Germany. of genius, who is the born child of the idea, It is because he thus operates a junction be- happening to be born in the aristocratic tween the French spirit and German ideas ranks, chafes against the obstacles which preand German culture, that he founds some- vent him from freely developing it. But Bything new, opens a fresh period, and de- ron and Shelley did not succeed in their atserves the attention of criticism far more than tempt freely to apply the modern spirit in the German poets his contemporaries, who English literature; they could not succeed in merely continue an old period till it expires. it; the resistance to baffle them, the want of It may be predicted that in the literature of intelligent sympathy to guide and uphold other countries, too, the French spirit is des- them, were too great. Their literary creatined to make its influence felt as an element, tion compared with the literary creation in alliance with the native spirit, of novelty of Shakspeare and Spenser, compared with and movement, as it has made its influence the literary creation of Goethe and Heine, is felt in German literature; fifty years hence a critic in the Cornhill Magazine will be demonstrating to our grandchildren how the phenomenon has come to pass. a failure. The best literary creation of that time in England proceeded from men who did not make the same bold attempt as Byron and Shelley. What, in fact, was the career of the chief English men of letters, their contemporaries? The greatest of them, Words-worth, retired (in Middle-Age phrase) into a monastery. I mean, he plunged himself in the inward life, he voluntarily cut himself off from the modern spirit. Coleridge took to opium. Scott became the historiographer royal of feudalism. Keats passionately gave himself up to a sensuous genius, to his faculty for interpreting nature; and he died of consumption at twenty-five. Wordsworth, Scott, and Keats have left admirable works; far more solid and complete works than those which Byron and Shelley have left. But their works have this defect-they do not belong to that which is the main current of the literature of modern epochs, they do not apply modern ideas to life; they constitute, therefore, minor currents, and all other literary work of our day, however popular, which has the same defect, also constitutes but a minor current. Byron and Shelley will be long remembeaed, long after the inadequacy of their actual work is clearly recognized, for their passionate, their Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern literature; their names will be greater than their writings: stat magni nominis umbra. We in England, in our great burst of literature during the first thirty years of the present century, had no manifestation of the modern spirit, as this spirit manifests itself in Goethe's works or Heine's. And the reason is not far to seek. We had neither the German wealth of ideas, nor the French enthusiasm for applying ideas. There reigned in the mass of the nation that inveterate inaccessibility to ideas, that Philistinism-to use the German nickname-which reacts even on the individual genius that is exempt from it. In our greatest literary epoch, that of the Elizabethan age, English society at large was accessible to ideas, was permeated by them, was vivified by them to a degree which has never been reached in England since. Hence the unique greatness in English literature of Shakspeare and his contemporaries; they were powerfully upheld by the intellectual life of their nation; they applied freely in literature the then modern ideas-the ideas of the Renaissance and the Reformation. A years afterwards the great English middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class, whose intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakspeare, entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred years. He enlargeth a nation, Heine's literary good fortune was greater says Job, and straiteneth it again. In the than that of Byron and Shelley. His theatre literary movement of the beginning of the of operations was Germany, whose Philistinnineteenth century the signal attempt to ap-ism does not consist in her want of ideas, or few "And yet, after all, no one can ever tell how things may fall out. The grumpy Englishman, in an ill-temper with his wife, is capable of some day putting a rope round her neck, and taking her to be sold at Smithfield. The inconstant Frenchman may become unfaithful to his adored mistress, and be seen fluttering about the Palais Royal after another. But the German will never quite abandon his old grandmother; he will always keep for her a nook by the chimney-corner, where she can tell her fairy stories to the listening children." Is it possible to touch more delicately and happily both the weakness and the strength of Germany-pedantic, simple, enslaved, free, ridiculous, admirable Germany ? And Heine's verse-his Lieder? Oh, the comfort, after dealing with French people of genius, irresistibly impelled to try and express themselves in verse, launching out into a deep which destiny has sown with so many rocks for them,-the comfort of coming to a man of genius, who finds in verse his freest and most perfect expression, whose voyage over the deep of poetry destiny makes smooth! After the rhythm, to us, at any rate, with the German paste in our composition, so deeply unsatisfying, of— in her inaccessibility to ideas, for she teems with them, and loves them, but, as I have said, in her feeble and hesitating application of modern ideas to life. Heine's intense modernism, his absolute freedom, his utter rejection of stock classicism and stock romanticism, his bringing all things under the point of view of the nineteenth century, were understood and laid to heart by Germany, through virtue of her immense, tolerant intellectualism much as there was in all Heine said to affront and wound Germany. The wit and ardent modern spirit of France Heine joined to the culture, the sentiment, the thought of Germany. This is what makes him so remarkable; his wonderful clearness, lightness, and freedom, united with such power of feeling and width of range. Is there anywhere keener wit than in his story of the French abbé who was his tutor, and who wanted to get from him that la religion is French for der Glaube: "Six times did he ask me the question: Henry, what is der Glaube in French?' and six times, and each time with a greater burst of tears, did I answer him- It is le crédit.' And at the seventh time, his face purple with rage, the infuriated examiner screamed out It is la religion;' and a rain of cuffs descended upon me, and all the other" Ah! que me dites-vous, et que vous dit mon boys burst out laughing. Since that day I have never been able to hear la religion mentioned, without feeling a tremor run through my back, and my cheeks grow red with shame." Or in that comment on the fate of Professor Saalfeld, who had been addicted to writing furious pamphlets against Napoleon, and who was a professor at Göttingen, a great seat, according to Heine, of pedantry and Philistinism : 66 'It is curious," says Heine, the three greatest adversaries of Napoleon have all of them ended miserably. Castlereagh cut his own throat; Louis the Eighteenth rotted upon his throne; and Professor Saalfeld is still a professor at Göttingen. It is impossible to go beyond that. ame? Que dit le ciel a l'aube et la flamme a la flamme?" or— "Siehst sehr sterbeblasslich aus, Doch getrost ! du bist zu Haus”in which one's soul can take pleasure! The magic of Heine's poetical form is incomparable; he chiefly uses a form of old German popular poetry, a ballad form, which has more rapidity and grace than any ballad form of ours; he employs this form with the most exquisite lightness and ease, and yet it has at the same time the inborn fullness, paWhat wit, again, in that saying which thos, and old world charm of all true form every one has heard : "The Englishman of popular poetry. Thus in Heine's poetry, loves liberty like his lawful wife, the French- too, one perpetually blends the impression of man loves her like his mistress, the German French modernism and clearness with that of loves her like his old grandmother." But German sentiment and fullness; and to give the turn Heine gives to this incomparable this blended impression is, as I have said, saying is not so well known; and it is by Heine's great characteristic. To feel it, one that turn he shows himself the born poet he must read him he gives it in his form as is, full of delicacy and tenderness, of inexhaust-well as in his contents, and by translation I ible resource, infinitely new and striking:- can only reproduce it so far as his contents, |